The Village of Sliding Time.

David Anonby is a sessional instructor in the English Department of
Trinity Western University, Langley, B.C.

Award-winning poet David Zieroth demonstrates mastery of the long, narrative, free-verse poem in this collection of three pieces. The centerpiece of this triptych is the titular work “The Village of Sliding Time” for which the highly imaginative premise is a kaleidoscopic odyssey through space and time via the Virgilian guidance of the adult poet by an incarnation of himself as a teenager. The poet’s younger self takes the poet (and the reader) on a nostalgic and evocative journey from present-day North Vancouver back to the small prairie town of his origins, before depositing him again on the West Coast. The poem feels like one continuous sentence, although technically it is not. It moves by free association from image to image and thought to thought, the boundaries between stanzas blurring in a manner befitting retrospection and childhood memory.

The earthy realism of prairie life in the middle of the 20th century is cast in a comic mould with occasional tragic contours. A sense of family harmony is captured in the following lines: “yet every child / loves the touch / at the end of the day / from the hand / that wrings the rooster’s neck.” Despite the apparent idealism of the setting and community, many of the rural folk desire to escape from the strictures of their geography and economy, leaving behind the “so-flat-you-had-to-flee / fields.” The insularity and parochialism of the village are probed in the dismissal of the schoolteacher for getting pregnant, who is replaced by a local young man who is “a fool for thinking / priceless meant cheap.” The real hardships of prairie life are not glossed over. Zieroth tells us of fatal accidents involving farm machinery, and of a sickly child, mourned for having died without living, who is tenderly compared to a runty animal taken in as a house pet. And although the poem is surprisingly unphilosophical, its exploration of how the landscape of childhood shapes adulthood is resonant and richly satisfying: “I can see / I haven’t left behind / what came with me.”